Testing. Testing. The auto mechanics are hard at work making sure the air-filled balloon-looking pillow-like bags work and deploy properly in this sleek and brand new car. Look at the dashboard and see how firmly the system is incorporated. But wait a minute, how does it know when to pop out and how can we make sure it doesn’t harm us? Turn on your thought wheels.

Safely, safety

Airbags have one aim – to protect those inside the car. It is a restraint system which acts to intercept. When a vehicle is met with a sudden impact, the people inside the car tend to move in a direction opposite to that of the forces of collision. This means there is high risk of critical injuries to occur. With airbags, the movement opposite to the forces is restricted and thus, the people inside the car remain relatively safe with lesser injuries. A seatbelt, also a restraint system, works with airbags to protect those inside the car.

Crash protector chemistry

Car companies want to offer best protection with the airbags they provide in their cars. To ensure this, the airbag mechanism goes through a series of simulations and tests for different types of impact conditions. Afterall, crashes aren’t all a single type. For this the bag is prepped thoroughly.

Airbags have one aim – to protect those inside the car. 
| Photo Credit:
Getty Images/iStockphoto

Airbags are made of strong nylon fabric which does not allow the gas with which it is filled to leak out. It is not normal air around us that’s inside the bag. There is a special chemistry for it. The key chemical involved is Sodium Azide (NaN3). Once the bag is made, they are kept folded at places in the car’s dash.

Chemical Reaction

2 NaN₂ > 2 Na + 3 N₂

Here you go, way too fast

As crashes happen suddenly, airbags cannot waste even a millisecond. Once the sensors in the bag detect a crash, the airbag has to be inflated quickly before damage is done. Once the crash is sensed, electric signals are sent to the igniter which triggers an exothermic reaction where sodium azide decomposes to produce nitrogen gas. This gas fills up the airbag. Since the sensors need a bit of time to do the detecting, the inflation has to be even quicker. Typically the full process takes about 25 to 30 milliseconds (0.025 to 0.03 seconds!)

Then, in about 50 milliseconds, the person inside the car comes into contact with the airbag. The airbag intervenes and absorbs the sudden forward movement reducing injuries and damage.

Things to note

Airbags are fantastic when there is space between the bag and the person. If the person is too close to where the airbag is, the immediate inflation can cause grave harm. This is why it’s advised that airbags should be used in conjunction with seatbelts. Make sure your seat is a good distance away. For children, care must be taken to ensure that they are properly buckled up for the ride. It is advised that children should be placed in the back seat. Ensure that the airbags aren’t defective. 

For all the talk of rising cyber-threats, digital sophistication and the inexorable march of artificial intelligence, one thing remains disconcertingly primitive: the passwords people choose to protect their online lives. According to a new report by NordPass, compiled with researchers from NordStellar, the world’s most common password is once again “123456” — a sequence so feeble that it barely qualifies as a lock at all.

The study analysed credentials found in publicly exposed databases between September 2024 and September 2025. The results form a kind of anthropological survey of the digital age. Across generations, countries and platforms, users continue to favour passwords that are short, predictable and instantly guessable. 

Younger cohorts, who are often presumed to be digital natives, prove just as culpable as older ones. Human behaviour, it seems, is far more consistent than technology.

Patterns emerge that feel almost quaint. Numeric strings dominate, as do simple variations on first names paired with birth years. Such choices reflect the enduring human preference for ease over effort, and for the familiar over the secure. 

Cybersecurity experts have advised users to keep long, unique passwords; combine characters; enable multi-factor authentication. Yet old habits seem to die hard.

This inertia carries real consequences. As attacks grow automated and criminals ever more sophisticated, the weakest link remains the individual user who cannot be bothered to move beyond the digital equivalent of leaving the key under the mat. 

Password managers, passkeys and other tools promise salvation, but only if people adopt them.

“123456” endures not merely because it is simple, but because it reveals something deeper about online life. Technology races ahead; human behaviour plods behind.

Elon Musk’s X recovered for most U.S. users after a brief outage on Friday, according to Downdetector.com, just days after the social media platform was hit by a disruption linked to Cloudflare’s network.

There were less than 500 reports of issues with the platform as of 11:47 a.m. ET, down from a peak of more than 20,500 incidents earlier in the day, according to the website that tracks outages by collating status reports from a number of sources. The actual number of affected users may differ from what’s shown because these reports are user-submitted.

X did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

Earlier this week, a spike in unusual traffic causing errors in web-infrastructure company Cloudflare’s network prevented thousands of users from accessing platforms such as X, Canva, ChatGPT and Grindr.

On Friday, too, Cloudflare was down for more than 500 U.S. users as of 10:57 a.m. ET, according to Downdetector.

In October, a major outage in Amazon’s AWS cloud service caused global disruption, affecting Amazon’s own services and apps such as Reddit, Roblox and Snapchat.

Last year in July, a CrowdStrike software update caused widespread Microsoft system outages, disrupting airlines, healthcare, shipping and finance.

The Trump administration is considering greenlighting sales of Nvidia’s H200 artificial intelligence chips to China, people familiar with the matter said, as a bilateral detente boosts prospects for exports of advanced U.S. technology to China.

The Commerce Department, which oversees U.S. export controls, is reviewing the policy of barring sales of such chips to China, the sources said, stressing that plans could change.

The White House and the Commerce Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The possibility signals a friendlier approach to China, after U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping brokered a trade and tech war truce in Busan last month.

China hawks in Washington are concerned that shipments of more advanced AI chips to China could help Beijing supercharge its military, fears that prompted the Biden administration to set limits on such exports.

The White House has put on hold a draft executive order that would seek to preempt state laws on artificial intelligence through lawsuits and by withholding federal funds, two sources said on Friday.

The draft order, which Reuters reported on earlier this week, would have likely faced significant pushback from states. But its consideration shows how far Trump is willing to go to help AI companies overcome a patchwork of laws they say stifle innovation.

The White House did not have a comment on Friday. On Wednesday a White House official said that until officially announced, discussion of potential executive orders was speculation.

The draft order would have tasked Attorney General Pam Bondi with establishing an “AI Litigation Task Force whose sole responsibility shall be to challenge state AI laws, including on grounds that such laws unconstitutionally regulate interstate commerce, are preempted by existing federal regulations, or are otherwise unlawful,” according to a document seen by Reuters earlier this week.

It would also direct the Department of Commerce to review state laws and issue guidelines that would withhold broadband funding in some cases.

The Senate voted 99-1 against an effort to block AI laws earlier this year. An initial version of that measure would have blocked states that regulate AI from the $42 billion Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment program, known as BEAD.

State lawmakers and attorneys general from both major political parties rallied against the measure at the time, calling it harmful to their ability to protect state residents from fraud, deepfakes and child abuse imagery.

The issue took on new life after Trump on Tuesday threw his weight behind a proposal by Republicans in Congress to add a similar provision to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).

Major players in the industry including Google, OpenAI and Andreessen Horowitz have pushed for the federal government to preempt state laws, saying a patchwork approach hinders innovation.

News of the draft executive order led to a flurry of reactions. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Georgia, opposed the effort. “States must retain the right to regulate and make laws on AI and anything else for the benefit of their state,” Greene said in a post on X on Thursday. “Federalism must be preserved.”

Amy Klobuchar, the Democratic senator from Minnesota, called the draft executive order “unlawful” and said it would “attack states for enacting AI guardrails that protect consumers, children, and creators — including by threatening high-speed internet for rural communities.”

Robert Weissman of Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization, said in a statement that AI was already causing massive harms, making it “almost unfathomable” that the administration would work to block sensible state regulation.

“For all his posturing against Big Tech, Donald Trump is nothing but the industry’s well-paid waterboy,” Weissman said.